Tradition says Sultan Mahmud's gold for the Shahnameh reached Ferdowsi's town as his coffin left it, and his daughter refused it

Ferdowsi spent about 30 years writing the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic. The fullest account of his payment comes from Nizami Aruzi, who visited his tomb about a century later and recorded what was told at Tus. In that account Sultan Mahmud agreed to pay 60,000 gold pieces. The money arrived in silver. One version blames a courier who disliked Ferdowsi's Shia sympathies; another makes the sultan complicit. Ferdowsi was in a bathhouse when it came. He split it between a beer seller and the bath keeper, wrote a satire on the sultan, and left. Years later Mahmud learned of the deception and sent the gold to Tus. It reached one city gate as Ferdowsi's funeral left by another. His only daughter refused it. The money was used to build a caravanserai at Chaha. A local cleric would not allow him in the Muslim cemetery, and he was buried in his own garden. The scholar Khaleghi-Motlagh puts the sum Mahmud sent at 20,000 dinars. Ferdowsi's own complaint of being underpaid is accepted; the details are legend. His tomb at Tus was rebuilt from 1928 to 1934 by the Society for the National Heritage of Iran.